Behaviour FAQ

This article covers common questions regarding Behaviour in Arbor. If you cannot find an answer to your question here, check our dedicated section of the Help Centre on Behaviour here.

Will an email or SMS be sent automatically to a student's guardian when they are issued a detention?

You can set Arbor to automatically send an email or SMS out to parents and guardians when a student is given a detention.

You can see how to enable this for each level of incident severity in the Notify about a detention section of this article: Setting up Behaviour in Arbor.

Make sure that there is an email address and mobile phone number logged for the school from School > School Details. The communication is sent from this email address/phone number, so it it must be added for the school.

Can I record Behaviour Points for Houses?

No, Behaviour Points can only be applied to individual students, and cannot be applied to Houses, Registration Forms, etc.

Can students cash in or Behaviour Points to pay for a School Shop item?

No, it is not possible to use Behaviour Points to purchase School Shop items. You can have staff manually remove points from a student's profile, but School Shop items can only be purchased with card payments of £1.00 or over.

Can we set up different staff for two-week detentions?

No, if your school is using a two-week timetable, it is not possible to assign staff members to detentions on alternating weeks, or have different detentions on alternating weeks.

Do students get notified or an alert for behaviour or Detentions?

No, students are not notified of behavioural records or detentions in Arbor, and you would instead need to send communications to them manually.

Can I set up neutral behaviours that are not linked to a severity level? 

Yes, you can set up neutral behaviours that are not linked to a severity level. As long as you have the School: Behaviour: Log Behaviour Incident to add a behaviour incident, and the Student Profile: Behaviour: Administer All/My Students permission to add a neutral behaviour type.

To do this, follow these steps:

Go to Students > Behaviour > Setup > Types.

Click the +Add button and leave the Severity blank.

You can then log neutral incidents in the same way as logging incidents. 

Can we change our Behaviour Policy Setup mid-year? 

While it is possible to do this, we do not recommend doing this, as this can have severely adverse effects on reporting and analysis.

Can we record victims or bystanders of behaviour incidents?

Yes, you can choose whether to include victims or bystanders in the list of students involved.

If you policy is to create one incident per student, and incident will be created for anyone you add to the student list, and any behaviour workflows that you set up for the behaviour type will also be logged for them.

To prevent this, you could choose not to add victims and bystanders to the student list, and add details of them in the Incident Summary.

You will need to decide at your school what your policy should be when recording students as victims and bystanders.

Can I add an internal exclusion across more than on day?

No, it is not possible to record an internal exclusion that spans multiple dates. Due to this, you would need to record each day separately.

Why are detentions still being set when my behaviour workflow is set to. 'do not assign to session'?

The Do Not Assign to Session option when assigning detentions is for schools that want to choose the detention session a student should attend when a detention is assigned.

By selecting this, detentions will still be set but the student will not be assigned to a particular detention session?

If you do not want to automatically assign a detention, you can switch this off in the incident workflows.

Can we customise the drop-down options for behaviour to fit our policy?

You can add and amend as many behaviour types which will allow anything you want to be added to the behaviour type dropdown.

You don't have to link these to behaviour or incident severity levels and the number ranking will only appear if they are.

You can read how to add behaviour types in our guidance here.